I dropped my strawberries on the floor of the market on my first morning here. I had arrived late on a Wednesday and everything in the town was closed and I didn’t know if it was anomalous or a state to which I’d have to adjust–quiet streets, darkened window displays of mannequins wearing vaguely Floridean outfits like cropped pants with front pleats and airy linen tops. I had arrived on Labor Day, and everyone was at home resting which is why everything was closed. But I only found that out the next day when two Canadians on a river boat cruise–which had docked here due to some minor flooding–mentioned it like it was something I should have known. For better or worse, along with the clothes I reluctantly stored in New York, I also left behind my ability to pretend. I didn’t know it was Labor Day, I said outright.
When I arrived at the store on Thursday morning, I was in profound panic. Since I wasn’t sure of the market’s hours and driven by a fear that I’d never be able to buy groceries again and perhaps I’d starve and nobody would know, I filled my basket with well over a week’s worth of food. And so I dropped my strawberries on the floor as I tried to place them delicately on the top of my bursting shopping bag. As it turns out, the market maintains regular hours, but I never did learn why the mannequins are dressed for a season they’ve never known.
And when I dropped my strawberries, which was right after I had dropped an apple and watched it roll toward the door and an old French man had reluctantly picked it up for me, everyone in the line that had begun to form let out in unison a cry of complete and utter disappointment. I paid. I left. I considered never showing my face there again. It is, however, one of the only groceries around, certainly the closest to me, and I even went back later that same day.
For a moment, I had this vision of being one of those big city girls in a Hallmark movie. I wondered if the old ladies in the neighborhood would be gossiping about the arrival of an American over the asparagus stall at the weekend market. But this idea was pretty instantly squashed when the man who helped me retrieve what I’d dropped pick them up was four times my age and not a young, rugged, bar-keep with a twinkle in his eyes. But what I’m coming to realize is things don’t have to be romanticized here. Everything has an innate romantic quality in the way of a late 18th century painting. Ominous skies. A perpetual smell of rain. A slowness but not the kind that is easy to resent. The patience of someone who is madly in love. The restraint of someone whose love is unrequited.
So I think I love it here. I love it in the way I tend to love old people and Sunday mornings and things that are naturally self-assured. My apartment–a ground floor studio with wide wide windows and an obvious industrial motif—smells like it once housed a cat. It’s dark and damp in the mornings and open and airy at night and I think that’s because of the high ceilings which have to be at least 12-feet tall and the aforementioned windows. I like to sit on the deep sills in the evenings and read my book and I do it because I want to and not because I think it will make someone fall in love with me. And I do it because then I’m hit over the head by simple sentiments like this one that leave me with a dizzying clarity as if I’d actually been hit over the head with a frying pan.
“But often instead of accepting the truth about ourselves, we cover it up. We try to make ourselves the way we think we’re expected to be. So many of the bad things that happen in the world come from people pretending to be something they’re not.” (This from The Bee Sting, which I’m currently reading and enjoying).
Arriving here felt instantly different then any other place that I’ve ever spent a prolonged amount of time and yet adapting was not very difficult. That’s because things are generally good here, which feels different and is also easily adaptable. The people are content and not in a way that is marred by resignation and resentment. The food is amazing because of its simplicity, its inclination to preserve the inherit qualities of fresh ingredients. The trees are trimmed and the paths are paved and not like the mowed lawns that belong to a sprawling suburban home. It is as if nothing that is truly good has to prove that it is.
Things turn sour when we feel we have to justify our existence to the rest of the world. It’s why we lead with our egos, and we leave ourselves behind. Like when we arrive at parties and we put on this front that everything is going well and actually it’s going really well because we got a new promotion or we started an LLC or we had THE PERFECT bagel. In this perpetual game of cat and mouse, it seems the only way to win is to pretend that we already have.
Because I think I am realizing now that I might have been wrong: That the walls I have been building were not only to delineate a certain boundary, to define my selfhood, but rather they exist to keep things out and hold things in. I think I felt so lost before I came here because I had actually conceded so much of myself to the person I was pretending to be. Like I was nervous to come because I wasn’t actually sure if I enjoyed being alone. I had this distant memory of feeling alive in my own company, but it had been so long, I couldn’t tell if this person had ever been me. Or how I’ve never been able, until now, to go for a run without my headphones because it is the only way to block out all all the Noise. But I actually think I love the sounds of birds and the space between any sounds at all. It seems that everything I’ve done since moving to New York has been to prove, to myself and others, that I can make it, that things can be good and so can I.
But when I arrived here, it felt like coming home, which is strange because I’d never been here before. And I think it’s because I felt, as if overnight, I’d been reunited with a version of myself that I had, long ago, locked away. The facade that I’d created has melted like a glacier in summer. I feel awash with newness, a return to what I thought I’d lost. And I picked my strawberries up off of the floor, rinsed them clean, and savored their simple sweetness.